Apple ][ relics

 

Tapwave Zodiac and other cool handheld devices

Tapwave Zodiac 2

Best app - EDGE

GeForce GT 710 graphics card and Fedora Linux

 It works. Plug and play.

Where this get interesting is after installing the Nvidia drivers, which you don't need as the Nouveau drivers that come with Linux work just fine. I had a go with Nvidia drivers and this fanless $35 card to see if there would be any difference in picture quality over the build in graphics card on my ThinkCentre M93p running Fedora 32. Doesn't seem to be any difference as far as I can tell. Except for the one film I have in x265.10bit.HDR format, playback is choppy. I noted Kodi says the GT710 does not support the x265 codex, so no hardware excelleration. However, when I switched to the Nvidia drivers, playback of my x265 4K file is smooth.

Here's where the fun started. With the Nvidia drivers installed, the card wasn't getting the same EDID info from my Athem AVM 60 media center as I did with the Nouveau drivers. When I switched to the Nvidia drivers, Pulseaudio  (pavucontrol) showed the HDMI audio profiles as unplugged unavailible, so no sound. Even with Pulseaudio disabled, Kodi would see 4 HDMI profiles, but no sound.

edid-decode /sys/class/drm/card0-HDMI-A-1/edid

EDID and xorg.conf files

 

Welcome to Linux emergency mode! Enter control-d to continue

 

If you're stuck in this "emergency mode" boot cycle, and/or the system just hangs on boot, a common reason is a mistake in /etc/fstab. Recently I removed a drive but forgot to delete the entry in fstab, and it bit me on reboot. Just boot rescue mode, mount the / file system and edit the fstab.

Scanning on Linux will drive you Xsane!

xsane is an excellent tool for scanning on Linux, I've used it for 25 years, since I worked with the developer to resolve some issues running it under Solaris long ago. Until my recent upgrade to Fedora 31, everything worked fine with Xsane, with my old Epson USB scanner and then my Brother network scanner.  All of a sudden, xsane was giving "segmentation fault, core dumped" on start up, but only on 1 of the computers running Fedora 31, my main desktop.  On the others it worked fine. Here's the problem I found:

locnar<885>% gdb xsane
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/xsane
Thread 1 "xsane" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007fffee9c07c0 in sanei_scsi_close ()
   from /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-epkowa.so.1

This ibsane-epkowa.so.1 was installed by the iscan package. Once I removed it, the trouble disappeared. I reinstalled xsane and sane-backends, followed by running linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.2-1 and I was back to scanning!

One issue I ran into with linux-brprinter-installer was it tried to install .deb packages and I need the .rpm packages on Fedora. This was because it tests to see if you have /bin/dpkg, which I did along with alien, so it thought I was on the wrong OS.

Learning Linux

The first to understand about Linux is it's not based on Windows, it's not another version of Windows, it's not "like" Windows, it didn't come after Windows, it's not a "free version" of Windows.  These are just common misconceptions repeated by Windows users that don't understand Linux.

Linux is based on the much older computer operating system called Unix.  Unix was around decades before MSDOS or Windows. Windows is derived from MSDOS, which is based on CP/M.

The second thing to understand about Linux is you don't need to "learn" Linux.  No one needs to learn an operating system today.  All you need to know is how to open the web browser and maybe how to copy pictures/music/video to/from the computer.  That's it!  Using a web browser, Gmail, Google Docs is just the same expirence on Linux as it is on Windows. The operating system is just there to enable you to run the web browser, anything beyond that is for computer hobbiests.

What you do need to know is how to get Linux, and it's improtant to understand Linux is FREE.  There's no cost, support is free, all the software that runs on Linux is free too!

Switching from Windows to Linux is much like switching from driving on left side of the road to driving on the right. If you've never driven before, it's easy to learn to drive on the right. However if you started with driving on the left, it's very hard to unlearn what you already know. Most "power users" of Windows are very unhappy with a move to Linux and generally revert to Windows in a very short time for this reason.

To makes things simple

Two main distros

Linux, Android phone, pictures sync

How do I move files, pictures, backups from my phone to my desktop? Actually it's very easy, and there's no need to install ADB, root your phone, connect USB cables, pop out SD cards, deal with FuseBlock filesystems or have to follow the arcane steps I see posted on other sites. It all can be done faster and better via Wifi with simple high level apps.

First, start with a Samsung account. Your phone, calendar, apps, etc get backed up to Samsung's cloud, 15GB for free. You can even store photos there and then view/download to your desktop. Lots of other features, like find your phone and view last calls.
Log onto https://findmymobile.samsung.com and/or support.samsungcloud.com.

Google Drive - shares files easily between phone and desktop, even share your photos with family and friends.

Google Keep - great app, I use it everyday. Lets you take notes on either desktop or mobile and they appear automatically on both, great for shopping lists, you can even share notes with other Google Keep users.

KDEConnect - very rich full featured app that integrates phone and desktop, lets you send and respond to SMS, see incoming phone calls on your desktop, use your phone as a desktop mouse, send files, browse files system and more. Another great app that I've used for years. Except for the problem of it not working. I get a few days or weeks out of it and then it unpairs and I have to go through a bunch of pair steps again, currently even though it's paired I can't send pictures to my desktop. Tried of dealing with, stopped using it.

Syncthing - My new favorite thing, rsync made easy. I've configured it to automatically transfer pics I take on my phone to my desktop. It doesn't have all the features of KDEConnect, but really all I care about, or anyone does, is getting pictures off my phone. Just one small problem, it doesn't support SD cards, where most people store their pictures. This makes it a practically useless app. However, there's a (arcane) workaround. All you need to do is manually create a file called ".stfolder" on the SD card in the photos directory. This can be easily done with ES File Explorer, or pop out the SD card and mount it on your desktop. The only problem is finding the right path on the phone, in my case I created this file "/storage/3138-3961/DCIM/Camera/.stfolder" and now all my photos sync from the SD Card to my Linux desktop.
Check out http://127.0.0.1:8384 after you install the Syncthing RPM.

AndFTP - Uses SSH to send files from your phone to your desktop, always works, great fall back if nothing else works.

So between Samsung cloud backups and Syncthing photo transfers, it's very easy now to get things off my Android phone.